From Dave "Egghead" Brigham:
While heading home from a photo expedition in Somerville one day, I drove southwest along Albany Street in Cambridge and realized I'd found my latest honey hole. This is often how things happen here at the blog; there is no master plan. And as I undertook my first exploration in this area, it dawned on me that I'd be making photos of part of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) campus.
This is the first post about the Cambridgeport neighborhood of the People's Republic of Cambridge. This post is long, but it offers some clips from "The Simpsons," some background on a job I held a quarter-century ago and fascinating history about this area that has made the transition from industrial to high-tech.
In addition to M.I.T. buildings, this post will feature office buildings of biotech and high-tech companies, some of which have spun out of the university; the institute's nuclear reactor (!); and other places that I suspect are manufacturing perpetual motion machines, anti-grief pills and even death rays.
This is by no means an exhaustive survey of M.I.T.'s Cambridgeport presence.
First, I'm gonna learn you a bit about Cambridgeport. This neighborhood, which runs approximately from Magazine Beach along the Charles River, to Massachusetts Avenue, to Vassar Street, to Western Avenue, shouldn't be confused with The Port. That latter neighborhood is bounded roughly by Hampshire Street to the north, the Boston & Albany Railroad to the east, Prospect Street to the west, and Massachusetts Avenue to the south. It was formerly known as Area Four. I explored some of that area three years ago (see April 3, 2020, "Walking Through a Waterless Port").
According to the National Register of Historic Places Nomination Form for the Charles River Basin Historic District, "Cambridgeport...was named with the expectation that the waterfront could be developed into a [sic] ocean port, and an intricate system of canals was constructed. In 1806, Congress designated Cambridge as an official United States port of delivery, but the Embargo of 1807-09 ended these mercantile plans. The Broad Canal, still a feature on the Cambridge waterfront, is the sole reminder of that era of waterfront development."
I explored the Broad Canal, and learned about Cambridge's history of waterways, in 2012 (see November 5, 2012, "Where's the Gondolier?").
Before we start swimming, I need to share this clip from "Modern Family."
OK, let's get our nerd on!
Why don't we get right to core of the matter.
I've known for years that M.I.T. had a nuclear reactor, but I didn't realize it was in plain sight, near the intersection of Albany Street and Massachusetts Avenue. I thought it was a little further east, hidden inside a building along Vassar Street. I'm not sure how I got that idea in my head.
Opened in 1958, the reactor is a "high performance 6 MW nuclear research reactor known as the MITR," according to the institute's Nuclear Reactor Laboratory (NRL). The reactor has enabled "educational training and cutting-edge research in the areas of nuclear fission engineering, material science, radiation effects in biology and medicine, neutron physics, geochemistry, and environmental studies," per the NRL's web site. "It is the second largest university research reactor in the U.S. [after the University of Missouri Research Reactor Center] and the only one located on the campus of a major research university."
Directly southwest along Albany Street are NRL buildings.
I hope there are no future Homer Simpsons working at the lab.
And I'm sure there's nothing to fear from fishing in the nearby Charles River:
OK, I'll stop posting nuclear panic videos. Be glad that I was unable to locate the "SNL" episode in which President Jimmy Carter, played by Dan Aykroyd, gets super-sized after the core of a nuclear plant has melted down.
I wrote about another nuclear reactor in the early days of the blog. This one was located in Watertown, and was part of the Watertown Arsenal complex (see May 19, 2010, "Nuclear Dump Playground?").
Moving on....
The buildings that include the NRL space and other M.I.T. departments along the south side of Albany Street present a great mix of red, orange and yellow brick. With so many shiny new buildings in Cambridgeport and elsewhere in the city, this area really has the feel of the early- to mid-20th century. These buildings along Albany Street are owned by M.I.T., but one hundred years ago, some of them housed baking companies.
Thanks to somebody's M.I.T. class project about digging deep into a small geographical site, which includes old Atlas Maps, I learned some good history about this area of Cambridgeport. Abutting the north side of the railroad tracks that run across Massachusetts Avenue, between Vassar and Albany streets, there used to be a C. Brigham Company Milk Depot (the company appears to have been based in Westborough). In later years, this was the home of Whiting Milk Companies. Currently this site, across the tracks from the well-known and gigantic Metropolitan Storage Warehouse buildings, is a parking lot.
The 1916 map shows that the nuclear reactor site, affiliated lab and adjacent buildings were once occupied by the Ward Baking Company. The M.I.T. class project linked above indicates that the Ward company buildings were demolished, along with the milk depot, but I'm dubious that all of the Ward buildings were razed. The milk facility is gone, but the buildings where the nuclear lab is located are dated to 1913 and 1937, according to the city's assessing department database, and certainly look of that era.
The 1930 maps shows that Ward added some properties to the west along Albany Street, and that the building at the end of the row was home to the National Biscuit Company, the company that eventually became Nabisco. I believe the Nabisco site was torn down and replaced by buildings now owned by M.I.T.
(I believe these buildings are the newer ones built by M.I.T.)
(Bitter Magnet would be a great name for a band.)
Other companies located along Albany Street and adjacent streets in 1916 included Standard Plate Glass Corp., The Paper Goods Company, John Cain Salad Dressing Company and Lamb & Ritchie Pipe.
Further southwest along Albany Street is a beautiful old place known affectionately by the M.I.T. community as The Warehouse.
Currently a dormitory for graduate students, this circa-1904 building has served numerous corporate, institutional and governmental functions in the last century. The first occupant of the building was the Hutchings-Votey Company, a prominent organ-building outfit, according to M.I.T.'s web site for The Warehouse. "During its three years of operation on Albany St., one of the most notable organs constructed by Hutchings was for the St. James Cathedral in Seattle, the mother church of the Archdiocese of Seattle and the seat of its archbishop," per the web site.
The next tenant was Library Bureau, a card and wood-working factory founded by Melvil Dewey, inventor of the Dewey Decimal System. "A building adjacent to the factory, 230 Albany Street, was constructed as the headquarters of Library Bureau in 1918," per The Warehouse web site. "In 1925 the company was bought by Remington Rand. At this time the factory at 224 Albany Street employed 450 men and women."
Next up was the United States Government. "The [U.S. Air Force] bought 224 Albany Street and on 25 September 1945 the building was designated as the headquarters of the Cambridge Field Station (later renamed the Air Force Cambridge Research Center)," per the M.I.T. web site. "Among the important work performed here was the initiation of the SAGE project, an automated system for tracking enemy bombers entering US airspace, whose final cost was estimated to be several times that of the Manhattan Project."
Eventually, M.I.T. took over use of the building. "The building continued to be a center for high tech research, as by 1961 it was occupied by the MIT Instrumentation Lab," per The Warehouse web site. "As leaders in the field, the I Lab was contracted to build the Apollo navigation system. The building, which had already been involved in SAGE and the Manhattan Project, was now once again part of one of the United States' most important technological endeavors."
Damn, that is some history.
Since 2001, 224 Albany has housed students.
Let's continue on to 270 and 280 Albany Street.
Built in 1920, these buildings are owned by BioMed Realty Trust, which owns nearly 16 million square feet of life-science property in locations including Boston/Cambridge, San Francisco, San Diego, Seattle, Boulder and Cambridge, U.K., according to the company's web site. The current tenant of these Albany Street properties is Sanofi, a French drug maker.
These properties were orginally a Standard Plate Glass Company manufacturing facility, per MACRIS. "The building continued as a plate glass factory until 1935 when it was sold to the Box Craft Company, which later became the Atlantic Paper Box Company," MACRIS indicates. "The Atlantic Paper Box Company operated until the 1980s, specializing in heart-shaped boxes for Valentine's Day candies."
More cool history, eh?
Now let's work our way back toward Mass. Ave. along the northern side of Albany Street, before moving further into the neighborhood.
This is 189 Albany Street (although M.I.T. lists it as #195), which the city's assessor's database indicates was built in 1948. The building is home to the MIT LIGO Lab, which looks "for some of the universe's most extreme objects," per its web site. "We also make gravitational wave detectors work better, exploring a lot of new and interesting physics on the way."
Translation: Jewish Space Lasers.
I believe this building (and others below) were warehouses once owned by Stimpson Terminal Company. It is connected to 185 Albany Street, which dates to 1890, per the assessor. M.I.T. acquired these properties in 2008.
Continuing north by northeast, we come to 175 Albany Street.
This building is home to M.I.T.'s Plasma Science and Fusion Center, which seeks ways to accelerate the pace of the development of fusion, which "is the process of combining light elements like hydrogen into heavier ones like helium," per the group's web site. The end goal: "to build power plants which would have an unlimited supply of fuel and have less environmental impact than any other source of energy."
The Plasma and Fusion buildings dates to the early 1920s. I'm pretty sure these buildings were also part of the Stimpson warehouse operation. At one time, a spur off the Grand Junction railroad line ran behind these buildings, where Purrington Street is now.
The final Albany Street buildings are known collectively as Edgerton House, home to graduate students and families.
This complex was originally home to the Elliot Addressing Machine Company, which moved here (or erected the buildings) in 1911, according to the Cambridge Historical Society. Founded by Sterling Elliot, the company was born from the founder's desire for a more efficient means of addressing labels for mailing The Bicycling World, a weekly magazine that was an outgrowth of Elliot's bike-building company. While he sold that company to the Stanley brothers of steam-powered automobile fame, he continued publishing the magazine.
Elliot's son, Harmon, headed the business after his father's death in 1922. A sale to an out-of-town company led to the shuttering of this facility in 1964. M.I.T. acquired the property and "leased it to a colorful string of occupants — the Paramount Coat Company, the Revelation Bra Company, and a series of small publishers — before gutting the structure and renovating the inside," according to this MIT Technology Review article. It opened as the Edgerton House in 2001.
OK, now I'm gonna move beyond Albany Street.
Located on the corner of Sidney Street, 15 Tudor Street is home to Edge Gravity, a subsidiary of Swedish tech company Ericsson that focuses on edge computing. What the @#&$% is edge computing? It's "a distributed information technology architecture in which client data is processed at the periphery of the network, as close to the originating source as possible," according to TechTarget.
The assessor says this building dates to 1910 and isn't owned by M.I.T. But the parking is listed as belong to the institution. And real estate listings online use an address of 125 Sidney Street. Go figure.
Anyway, the 1916 Atlas map available online lists a small building owned by the Neapolitan Ice Cream Company here. That company was based a short distance away on Landsdown Street. The 1930 map shows a listing for William C. Thairlwall & Company, about which I've not been able to find anything. Current owner is Rizika Realty Trust.
Directly behind the Edge Gravity building is 17 Tudor Street, below.
I'm not sure if this is part of the Ericsson division complex.
Moving southwest on Sidney Street, we come to #137-149.
Built in 1954 and owned by M.I.T., this property is home to Accelleron, which manufactures breast pumps, nebulizer compressors, blood pressure monitors and other devices.
Across the street, at #148, is another M.I.T.-owned property.
Owned by M.I.T., this building dates to 1995, per the assessor, but I'm dubious of that date. It is home to Commonwealth Fusion Systems, which was "spun out of MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center," per the company's web site.
Next is 167 Sidney Street, which is owned by M.I.T. and was built in 1927.
This building is also occupied by Accelleron. I believe that this building, and the one below at 99A Erie Street (which is also owned by M.I.T.) are more Stimpson warehouses. The 1930 online map is marked "Harry F. Stimpson," and a railroad spur is shown crossing Sidney Street and ending between these two buildings, and two others fronting on Emily Street, where Accelleron is located. So it's possible that those latter buildings are older than what the assessor indicates.
(Built in 1927, this building is home to Centogene, which calls itself a data-driven rare disease company.)
Across Erie Street from 167 Sidney Street is a building whose history ties in with my own.
Currently home to Q-State Biosciences, 80 Erie Street (aka 179 Sidney Street) dates to 1930. Q-State "is a discovery technology and therapeutics company that combines advanced human cellular models, unique measurement engineering and AI / ML into a proprietary platform that enables novel discovery of optimized genetically targeted medicines for epilepsy, pain, and other diseases of the CNS."
Wow, I don't know what the f**k means, but it makes a nice segue into my connection to this place. In the late '90s into the early aughts, I worked in this building, for a company called Digital Music Network. The start-up, co-founded by a college friend of my wife's, did business as Webnoize, which was the name of the music industry conference we held in L.A., the research practice we had, as well as the daily news publication, which is where I worked. The company was small, never growing beyond two dozen employees, but we worked hard, gained a strong reputation in all three of the business units and were ahead of the curve in terms of covering the digital entertainment revolution of the early 21st century.
The Q-State quote about its business model cited above brings to mind the verbiage that the Webnoize founders crammed into press releases and marketing materials. Here's a small sample, from the 1998 conference booklet for the company's inaugural event in Los Angeles: "Webnoize is digital delivery and fatter pipes, MP3 and MTV, VH1 and VQF, licensing and registration, cross-marketing and strategic partnerships, watermarking and webcasting - all presented with a SMIL and a Fraunhofer, when appropriate."
I have no idea what "VQF" is or was. A quick Google search turns up a few options, with my favorite being "Vermont Quilt Festival," which sounds like a great time. I also tripped over SMIL, which, according to Wikipedia, is short for Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language...a World Wide Web Consortium recommended Extensible Markup Language (XML) markup language to describe multimedia presentations."
OK.
As for Fraunhofer, I guess it's short for Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, "the world’s leading applied research organization," according to its web site.
Despite some blather from the corner office, Webnoize was a good little company. But things came to a rather quick end after September 11, 2001, as a company that was always scratching for money lost the opportunity to make some via a New York conference. It all came to an end in mid-November 2001.
I'm sure that the business listed at this site in a 1930 online map used plenty of bullshit marketing, too. Henry Thayer & Company made snake oil, er, I mean, medicinal preparations such as extract of Yerba Santa. That herb is still in use today, to treat "respiratory conditions including coughs, colds, tuberculosis, asthma, and chronic bronchitis," per RxList. "It is also used for fever and dry mouth. Some people use it to relieve muscle spasms, to loosen phlegm, and as a tonic. Yerba santa is sometimes applied directly to the skin in a warm dressing (poultice) to treat bruises, sprains, wounds, insect bites, and to relieve joint pain (rheumatism)."
Well, the joke's on me. Now known as Thayers, the company is alive and well, no doubt thanks to soothing Restorative Body Balm, Radiance Boosting Serum and Milky Hydrating Face Toner with Snow Mushroom and Hyaluronic Acid. Dr. Henry Thayer founded the company in Cambridge in 1847. Blah blah blah, the company is now headquartered in Easton, Connecticut.
I found the trio of buildings seen below quite charming.
On the left is 197 Sidney,, which is a three-bedroom, two-bath townhouse. The other two buildings combined comprise 60 Hamilton Street. Built in 1925, this property is home to Cadent Therapeutics, which is part of drug maker Novartis.
Below is WW25, an M.I.T. building located between Chestnut and Waverly streets and Putnam Avenue.
M.I.T. leases this building, which was built in 1960. I'm guessing that this is where students and professors conduct alien dissections.
Across Putnam Avenue I spied two buildings with that mythical HP Garage feel to them.
Owned by M.I.T., this place dates to 1974 and looks like an auto body shop. The garage below was constructed in 1920, per the assessors office.
Seems likely that this is where nerds build death rays and plant-based jet packs.
Not far away, in an M.I.T. parking lot, sat a lonely green bus.
This lime-tinted rig was once used by Locomote Media to produce live recordings and streaming of concerts, events and performances with studio-quality audio mixes and video mixes, according to the LinkedIn page of Ed Krasnow, who was the company's director of video operations. The company appears to have gone off-line in 2020.
And now for something completely different.
This is 640 Memorial Drive, a building just north of the Boston University Bridge that I've long wondered about. It has that "This used to be something" look to it, doesn't it? I guess you can say that about any old building, but with this place, there's no doubt. "The Cambridge Assembly was a Ford Motor Company factory...which opened in 1913," according to Wikipedia. "The factory had the first vertically-integrated assembly line in the world."
In operation from 1913 to 1926, the plant was where Model Ts were manufactured, according to the web site of Tsoi Kobus Design, which worked on the building's redevelopment. Check out that web site in order to see some great new and old photos of this building. Other models were built here, moving through the five-story assembly process, according to History Cambridge. In 1926, the assembly line moved to neighboring Somerville. That plant was eventually torn down and replaced by Assembly Row.
Owned by M.I.T. (perhaps in partnership with Alexandria Real Estate), 640 Memorial Drive was also home to a Polaroid facility at some point, according to Wikipedia. Boston Biomedical (part of Japan's Sumitomo Pharma) is located here, I believe, alongside fellow bio-tech Sanofi-Genzyme.
Henry Ford invented the moving assembly line, which led to the early success of his automobiles. It's cool to think that a major innovation in that process occurred right here by the banks of the River Charles.
If you were to hop on an old-fashioned handcar and ride the Grand Junction railroad northeast from the east side of 640 Memorial Drive, you'd come across the last two buildings on this tour of Cambridgeport.
This is the rear of M.I.T.'s Air Force ROTC building, seen from the opposite side of the train tracks. As you might be able to guess from the name "HEINZ" chiseled into the facade, this used to be a warehouse for that company's products, such as ketchup and mustard. The building dates to 1915.
I haven't found out when Heinz stopped using the building, and when M.I.T. took it over.
We're going to finish this installment with perhaps the biggest -- literally and figuratively -- icon of Cambridgeport.
Located at the corner of Vassar Street and Massachusetts Avenue, the Metropolitan Storage Warehouse buildings, with their enormous painted signage, have long fascinated me. Despite the name of the business splayed across buildings much longer than football fields, I thought of these dark-brick buildings as being somehow holders of nefarious secrets and valuable treasures, when in reality they just held boxes of people's junk (and maybe the odd Renaissance masterwork or two).
"The Metropolitan Storage Warehouse...was the first building built on the filled land between the Grand Junction Railroad and the Charles River embankment," according to MACRIS. "Built in 1895 to the designs of Peabody & Stearns, the Boston architectural firm, the warehouse helped to establish the castellated Renaissance Revival style used in later buildings in this newly developing area of Cambridge."
The construction of the warehouse complex was the first component in a major new initiative. "The development of the riverfront east of the railroad from the West Boston (Longfellow) Bridge to the Cottage Farm (Boston University) Bridge was undertaken by private investors beginning in 1880, in response to the filling of the Back Bay in Boston and the development of West Chester Park (now Massachusetts Avenue) from the South End to the river bank in the 1870s," according to MACRIS. "In 1880 the owners of the marshes and mudflats in this area formed the Charles River Embankment Company. They began construction of the seawall along the length of their holdings in 1883, and then hydraulically dredged the river bottom to provide fill."
Now owned by M.I.T., this "medieval castle on a city street corner," as the university calls it, is undergoing renovation. "MIT’s adaptive reuse of the Metropolitan Warehouse building will redevelop it as a center of interdisciplinary design research and education, providing a new home for the School of Architecture and Planning (SA+P)," according to this M.I.T. web site. "The building will also house the new MIT Morningside Academy for Design, which aims to foster collaboration and innovation on campus, encouraging design work to grow across disciplines. In addition, the building's flagship Project Manus makerspace will serve as a substantial addition to the MIT Makersystem and will expand the design and fabrication facilities available to the campus."
Phew! That wraps up a post that turned out to be much more involved than I initially planned. Make sure to check for parts two and three about Cambridgeport, in which I will cover street mosaics, the funky homes of local artists, a historic church under renovation, the site of a former gay club, a well-known neon sign, a former Polaroid building, a massive steam plant, a former tooth-maker's building and much more.
For more M.I.T.-related stuff, see June 8, 2019, "UPDATE: Strolling Among the L7's in Kendall Square."
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